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Regeneration
Change
Transformation
Within our industrialised and mechanistic existence we seem to respond to change
with difficulty Why is this?
A change is as a good as a rest / so the saying goes.
Following the rest we are regenerated but we need to change to experience the
regeneration.
Old Hulme
New Hulme
Yet even in the New Hulme its land gets older as place, location its age increases.
It is just the built designed surface that is intrinsically new

In my time in Hulme I met an architect who employed dousing as a form of

negotiating space and the lines of energy that space was formed of
David Ellis was interested in why buildings were built on the sites that they were.
What patterns of energy made a place as a built environment. Ellis constructed
Manchester as a body.
The brain being located in Chethams School of Music the location of the first well,
the first library an original settlement.
The heart being located in Piccadilly, a central hub for transportation moving in /
moving out, a location that refreshes the body.
The sexual energy located in the pit of the stomach, charged, dynamic life being
located in Hulme, wild, spontaneous, dangerous, animalistic and open for change.

Its my story & Ill lie if I want to . . .

Ive heard enough of them about my story through other peoples stories . . .
Its my story & Ill lie if I want to . . .
Ive heard enough of them about this city through other peoples stories . . .

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Its 1988 or was it 1989?

Its a series of crystal tales of clap crap
Caught in a trap that people tell to rejuvenate something of their lives.
I was / I am / I did / I was there /
Manchester, a city building itself on mistaken identities, inflated myths, fabricated,
commercial & industrialised histories . . .
I was / I am / I did / I was there . . . .

Its 1988 or was it 1989?

I was / I am / I did / I was there
At the time
I was searching for a bolt hole /
A way out of an over domesticated suicidal situation
My flesh needed liberating
My spirit sanitising
My brain super charging

I was offered a key to a flat at a price

In the crescents of Hulme
Offered to purchase a key to a council owned flat
It was Thatchers Britain and everyone was an entrepreneur
The Achilles heel of a generation /
Caught between the chambers of post war melodic futures /
Distracted by myths of free love / radical politics
That was being undermined and disregarded / A challenge and alternative to super
charged capitalism was being radicalised and subverted by the very politic it
intended to alter.
A generation hampered by glam rock

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Hammered by punk
Suckled on the dried out tits of Thatcher and the wrinkled prick of Reagan
We were doomed to fuck our buddy
Trapped in a myth of Freedoms sold
Caught between greed and puritan protestant guilt and the shop keepers urge to
keep the books /

I was / I am / I did / I was there

Informing the key seller that I was presently his dancer lecture
and that charging me for a key for a squat was slightly fucked up
I moved in.

Hulme
(Of) all redevelopment schemes that will rejuvenate the Britain of tomorrow,
Manchesters plan for Hulme stands out boldly. For it is unique. Here is a fascinating
concept which should make proud not only the planners but the citizens. That the
design for a thousand maisonettes in long curved terraces will give a touch of
eighteenth century grace and dignity to municipal housing is welcome indeed. But
above all the plan is realistic Thank goodness someone has been using both
imagination and common sense in planning homes.
Manchester Evening News 1965

I had arrived into Utopia

Brutalist
Where concrete flows
Modernist
Ideal
Free

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It was our wild wood, our rites of passage, our extension of student hood, to sustain
learning, exchanging, engaging, discovering, reinventing and questioning everything.
A site
Where lyrical youth could compose their own tunes
Leave the trappings of the norm
I was / I am / I did / I was there

1980s Hulme an anarchic free-for-all that created Planet Hulme. This was a Modernist utopia
decaying, gone crumbled and decadent; a creative, Bohemian enclave.
Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010)
But
Wilson & Womersley the Hulme Designers
Stated
that the analogy we have made with Georgian London and Bath is entirely valid. By
the use of similar shapes and proportions, large-scale building groups and open
spaces, and, above all, by skilful landscaping and extensive tree planting, it is our
endeavour to achieve, at Hulme, a solution to the problems of twentieth-century
living which would be the equivalent in quality of that reached for the requirements of
eighteenth-century Bloomsbury and Bath.
Yeah
18th Century Bloomsbury & Bath

I was / I am / I did / I was there

Id entered a landscape of Brutal mis-form mis-function

Of factory built modules to build an industrialised future modern existence
Of inside toilets & bath with hot running water
Balcony streets held lofty in skies
This was modernism built on the cheap

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For the poor

To enable the political agencies to re-boot and re-house the masses.

Id entered a landscape of the socially and politically illicit

Sex Drugs Theft Murder Cheating Guns Knives Muggers
Clubs Dancing Talking Thinking Tinkering Deviancy Romantic Haven of cut loose
and fancy frolicking free The summer stench of dog shit hung heavy in your hair
Winter was frigid hell
I was / I am / I did / I was there

I am a human being who responds to Space, Place and People.

I instinctively tap into the essence of site and location.
The rhythms, patterns, forms, shape, functions, & histories, the psychic disorders
and orders, the odours, the frictions and harmonies of site and place.
It is a method of survival and translated into an occupation.
Artist
I generate specific creative responses to locations that historically might be a specific
site or institution or a housing estate or a city or a country or continent.

It was 1989?
I was / I am / I did / I was there
I was approached by the local green grocers with 250 to pyrotechnic the sky.
It was approaching November 5th /
Historically we burn Catholics and celebrate our religious independence from Rome,
plus it seals our ability to sustain order and control in the face of revolution.
But, really November is the ending of seasons, the cleaning up of the land, the
arrival of death and change. It is a final primeval party before winter truly sets in.

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Rather than decoration I opted for ignition, co-operation, collaboration &

galvanisation.
Three people turned a tennis court into an incendiary devise but many were involved
to build the Houses of Parliament employing pallets to construct the classic home for
English democracy rather than Guy Fawkes we opted for Maggie to be mounted
onto the tower of Big Ben.
There was no community, there is no community
There is and was a series of community happenings, events, instalments and shared
beliefs within a geographic location, that brought people together to participate,
engage, exchange and

Dogs of Heaven was a name generated to express what we were perceived as . . .

Dogs in our own Heaven. This was a perception of people and of place
My aim with Dogs of Heaven was simply to engage with what I was obsessed with;
that being the making of site based performance.
To sustain a politic that anyone can engage with performance, that community art
does not have to be all withies and tissue paper, that production values could be
high, that the work could be inclusive, demanding and contemporary, that no one
owned the product, that it would alter how a location and its people were perceived
and valued.

Dogs in our own heaven.

Dogs of Heaven worked

It was immense fun
It changed lives
It galvanised people and place
It made the impossible possible
It alter perceptions
It went on tour
It grew from 3 people to engage with 100
It made imaginations real

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It was a beautiful thing to do.

It kick started a process of regeneration with a positive lick
It enabled the community to press a print of identity onto a process of change
The vultures flew in
It was knocked down
It changed
It is still changing
It attracts the alternative still with the opening of the new alternative medicine school.

Perfect.